We Don’t Know How to Count Dead People
Why are the most basic problems in medicine some of the hardest to solve? This series explores the big questions that science is still struggling to answer.
As nasty diseases go, malaria is particularly vile. Caused by a parasitic protozoan — a microscopic one-celled creature that lives inside human blood — and spread by mosquitos, it’s the kind of disease that might seem like nothing much, at first, until the havoc within becomes too much for the body to withstand. Chills give way to fever and nausea and headaches; these symptoms can pass in a few days or weeks. Meanwhile, as the parasite reproduces, it takes refuge inside the kidneys, the lungs, the liver, the brain. At a certain point, it can overwhelm these organs, and the host — the human — will die.
For years, malaria has been considered especially deadly to children, particularly in Africa. In 2010, the World Health Organization’s World Malaria Report put the number of annual global deaths caused by malaria at 655,000, making it among the most deadly of infectious diseases, alongside HIV and tuberculosis.
The WHO number, however, turned out to be wrong, and not for the better. A 2012 analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a University of Washington-based group funded by the Gates Foundation, found that the actual number was closer to 1.2 million…
